Commemorating Human Rights: Exploring Origins, Episodes, and Historicity in Constructing a Human Rights Timeline

Historicizing and commemorating human rights struggles have become key aspects of contemporary human rights scholarship. Human rights violations represent the most extreme manifestation of political and social violence, and this often produces traumatic collective experiences that societies increasingly find necessary to commemorate and memorialize. Questions of origin and meaning are recurring themes in debates over historicizing and commemorating human rights struggles. Whereas many scholars locate the foundational history of modern human right in natural law and Western liberalism, others argue for a more eclectic understanding of the concept, focusing on divergent notions of rights across globe. This article reviews some of the dominant arguments in debates about the origins and meanings of human rights and explores their implications for constructing a historical human rights timeline for museum projects. It argues that a public history of human rights must engage multiple and contested narratives of human rights struggles and experiences. Such engagement is necessary even if the inherent analytical and interpretative tensions are not fully resolved.